


where are we when the dust settles?

by TheVoidWalkers



Series: The Void Walkers (official interludes) [1]
Category: The Void Walkers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-29
Updated: 2015-09-29
Packaged: 2018-04-24 00:22:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4898296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVoidWalkers/pseuds/TheVoidWalkers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It happens like this: in one breath, the promise of peace - in the next, they are at war. Except it’s longer than a breath, and a lot uglier, and Lauré Nilasémo was there for every bit of it.</p>
<p>(P016-017 interlude)</p>
            </blockquote>





	where are we when the dust settles?

**Author's Note:**

> The Void Walkers is a queer fantasy multimedia project updated every Tuesday over at the-void-walkers.tumblr.com!
> 
> I decided to make the AO3 the home of the series interludes after Tumblr formatting made it way more stressful than it needed to be. Honestly, I think we've all been there. But yes! If you're interested in supporting a queer fantasy webcomic written by a young queer graduate, please have a glance over at the webcomic itself. If you came here from the webcomic, thank you! <3

**_Frinlanto’stoi, 2467 Post Empire_ **

\------------

She’s flat on her back with her ears ringing and blood in her mouth, but she is  _alive_. She opens her eyes and it feels as if she’s having to peel back the lids, and she stares up uncomprehending for a long moment because all she sees is a white so stark that the backs of her eyes throb. She lifts a hand and sees that the white is dust, thick and choking, already in her lungs enough that when she tries to sit up her chest seizes. She tries again, hauls herself to hands and knees, and though her limbs are quaking they don’t give way.

      There’s a lump beside her in the dust, and she plunges her hands into it and finds the thick drape of a cloak. She pulls, squeezing her eyes narrow against the cloud she works up, and the breath she holds rips free as the cloak pulls back and a child rises up out of the filth.

Lauré pulls them towards her, smoothing her fingers over the child’s hair as they heave and cough. She’s touched these curls a thousand times, knows the shape of these small hands, and she feels a relief so pure and strong that she is crying before she can stop herself.

“We have to – we have to go,” Lauré says, voice thick on dust and tears, and she staggers to her feet and pulls the child up with her. Their eyes are wild and red-rimmed, breath wheezing on the dust in the air, but Lauré doesn’t have the luxury of letting them wait for the air to clear.

      Their boots catch and slide on hunks of masonry and stone as they walk, clutching at each other with dirty hands. There are shingles beneath the debris, and to their right they can hear the hiss of breaking waves as they fizz and foam on the shoreline. Somewhere ahead of them are the docklands, and the two of them stumble in their direction with aching slowness.

“Where is everybody?” asks the child, and Lauré nearly bites through her tongue as she remembers a light so brilliant it scoured the skin and made the bones vibrate. She bunches a hand in the collar of the child’s shirt and lifts, hauling them over the next chunk of masonry blocking their path. They need to be faster.

“Lauré?”

      Two small figures, one familiar and beloved, the other with that terrible light pouring from eyes and ears and nose and mouth. The thunderclap of shattering stone, a fall that she thought would kill her. Lauré grabs the child’s collar and lifts again, and her stumbling steps have become a run somewhere along the way.

“Lauré, you’re – you’re hurting me!”

      The child twists free and Lauré reacts on a gut-punch of instant, lurching after them and lifting until she has them slung over one shoulder. The weight doubles the tremble in her legs but she lifts her chin and keeps heading towards the docks. Without the swing of her sword at her hip her steps come out uneven, too used to compensating for the weight of it at her left hip.

      She keeps going, ironing out the unsteadiness of her walk with each successive step. She does not think about the blood on her front, bright against the dust. She does not think about the fact that it is not her own.

 

\------------

 

Lauré is five and she watches her _detha_  train, the surge and flex of her arms, the flash of her sword, the steadiness of her footwork. She is five and she is the latest daughter of twelve generations of guardsfolk and she already yearns for a sword of her own. She is just Lauré. She will not earn a surname for another three decades.

Above them the damtower of Frinlanto’stoi reaches skywards from the cliffs it roots in, its shadow splitting the city in half. Beside Lauré is her  _hametha_ , her gnarled old fingers twitching with every clash of blades, the memory of her own sword twisting the shape of her hands so that they clasp at empty air. Lauré watches those hands and copies what they do until her fingers cramp and the tower’s shadow swings around to cool the stones that she’s been sitting on.

Lauré has a friend who comes with them sometimes, but she won’t sit for as long as Lauré even when it’s her own detha training in the courtyard. “I want to see the world. I want to be my own person,” she tells Lauré, and Lauré stares down at her hands as she dutifully makes the shapes her hamadem does and does not understand.

“Let’s go home,” says her detha, and Lauré blinks up at her, at the grand shape of the tower behind her, and thinks  _I am home_.

 

\------------

 

      That silhouette is different now. Lauré sees this as the dust finally begins to settle and she finally chances a look over her shoulder. The damtower is concave on the south side, a maw of rough stone leading into interiors that have visibily warped and collapsed. The fifty-metre pillars that supported the roosting hall have buckled outwards, two of them entirely ejected by the force of the blast. Looking back along the beach, Lauré realises that they’ve been climbing over those pillars. The masonry beneath their feet used to be a part of the tower. They are over a mile away from the tower now, and still the debris is all around them. Lauré doesn’t understand how this is, or why this has happened. She does know that she’s so frightened that she’s still trembling, frightened enough that when they reach the docklands she lets Scarien down so she can lean against a building and retch.

       _Scarien._ Kahira’s Scarien. Not ‘ _child’_. Lauré has done this before – sinking into her training, blocking out everything else. She blinks and the dust has settled even more, and Scarien is peering up at her in concern. Shit. She’s losing time.

“We have to,” she says, has to stop and swallow as her dry throat scratches and seizes. “We have to get out of the city. Off the island.”

“Not – back?” asks Scarien, naively hopeful in a way Lauré can’t be.

      Scarien didn’t see the rocks fall. Scarien didn’t see those two figures as they faced off against one another. Lauré remembers tucking their head against her so they wouldn’t see it.

“Not back,” says Lauré, because she doesn’t know how she can tell a five year old that their nadem is dead when Lauré herself wants to throw up at the memory of it. Lauré has always known what she wants from life, has always been steady in methodical in the attainment of those things, and now that they have been ripped away she doesn’t know what to do.

      She doesn’t know what to do, and Scarien is five years old and Lauré has to keep them safe and Lauré  _doesn’t know what to do._

      Lauré thinks of the friend from her childhood, the one who was also the daughter of guards but didn’t want that the way Lauré did, the one who wanted to be her own person, to see the world. Amelar lives in the docklands, Lauré knows. She became a messenger just before Lauré qualified as a guard, and Lauré last heard from her around the time she was promoted to Guard Captain but they parted warmly and Lauré is too desperate to care about awkwardness.

“We’re going to see a friend,” Lauré tells Scarien, and prays to Demethol that Amelar is at home.

 

\------------

 

She is fifteen when she gets her first set of armour, stiff with newness but   _hers_  , and she scratches her name into the metal collar and traces the letters until she falls asleep. Only yesterday she’d been wearing leathers worn soft by her sisters and her   _detha_   and her   _hametha_  before her, the metal plating gone smooth at the edges. Today she has learnt the stiffness of new leather over her skin, the smell of it, the rasping sound of the overlapping plates on her shoulders.

“Look at you,” says Amelar, when Lauré goes to her the next day – driven by some wordless need to show her what she’s turning away from. “A proper little soldier.”

“There’s still a place for you, if you want it,” says Lauré, but Amelar is shaking her head before she’s even finished speaking.

“I want to be my own person,” says Amelar, the same thing she’s said since they were too small for armours and swords and training, when they were girls together, and Lauré still doesn’t understand it.

“I am my own person,” says Lauré, and her hand lifts to touch the metal collar where she’s etched in her name.

      Amelar watches her, something strange in her eyes. Lauré feels as if there’s a disconnect between them, bigger than before. “I guess you are,” says Amelar, and it comes out like some kind of astonishing revelation when it’s a fact Lauré’s known her whole life.

“Why can’t you be?” asks Lauré. “What’s stopping you from making this your own thing?”

      Amelar stares at her for a long moment, and then says, “You’re nice, Lauré, but you can be really fucking oblivious at times.”

      She walks away, and Lauré watches her go.

 

\------------

 

      “It’s not often that the Captain of the Royal Guard graces my doorstep,” says Amelar, through a doorway she blocks with her body, and Lauré takes a second to wonder whether they had parted as warmly as she’d thought.

“I need your help,” she says, and pushes Scarien in front of her because they just don’t have the time for this right now – whatever this is. “This is—”

“I know who that is,” says Amelar, startled for a moment but then turning abruptly wary. “Why are you here, Lauré? Why is—” she flaps her hands at Scarien in wordless frustration.

“I’m here because of  _that,_ ” says Lauré, and she turns to the side and looks pointedly over her shoulder at the wreck that is the smouldering remains of the damtower. When she looks back Amelar’s cockiness has gone. Her eyes are round with horror, mouth a pressed-thin trembling line.

“You’d better come in,” says Amelar, and she steps aside to allow them entrance.  

 

\------------

 

      The space inside is cramped and dark. The walls are brown, with thick rugs tacked up on any without windows, and the floor is striped with wood, a lot of it buckled by water damage. There’s a small fireplace, a door that might lead to a toilet, and a bed pushed up in one corner. Lauré looks round at it all and feels something squeeze on her insides. She’d thought Amelar had a house, had seen it from the outside but never bothered to come in. Instead she is crammed into this tiny one-room space, the upstairs probably serving as another such home with its own separate entrance.

      She knows without taking measurements that the entirety of Amelar’s home would fit twice into her family’s bathhouse up in the damtower. Amelar’s family have been guards for even longer than Lauré’s, and their assigned living quarters show it.

“Why are you here?” says Amelar, and she sounds tired. She stands in the middle of the room, leaving them awkwardly close to the front door. Lauré can feel Scarien leaning on her a bit but doesn’t dare ask Amelar if Scarien can sit down. “Yeah, the tower, whatever. I got that part,” she says, when Lauré raises an eyebrow at her. “But why are you  _here?_  Why did you come to me?”

“I need a way off the island,” says Lauré.

“And you’re taking—?” exclaims Amelar. “What happened up there?”

      Lauré thinks of the burning light, and the figure it erupted from. “I don’t think I should tell you,” she says. “I think it’d be safer if you didn’t know the details.”

“Safer than bringing the second-born child of the North Star into my home?” says Amelar, and Lauré is too tired to stop herself from wincing. “You haven’t changed a bit, have you?”

      A small hand tugs on the front of Lauré’s soft undershirt where it’s come un-tucked from her trousers, and she crouches down to Scarien’s height, taking their hand in one of her own and squeezing it tight. “It’s all right,” she says, soft, and Scarien nods, throat working furiously, eyes bright. Lauré opens her arms and lets Scarien come to her, because she knows Scarien, has seen them grow from squealing infant to a charming toddler to a quiet, thoughtful child. She lets Scarien press into her arms, and then and only then does she close the circle of her arms around them and turn her head to press a kiss to their dusty, tousled hair.

      She looks up and Amelar is staring at her, shocked in a way she wasn’t even when she opened the door to them. “You’re good with them,” says Amelar, eventually, and Lauré lifts a finger to her lips to shush her, holds Scarien closer.

      Her throat is wrecked by dust and screaming, but she hums the sweet notes of the song that’s been putting Scarien to sleep since they were born, and something in her finally begins to calm as Scarien leans against her more and more heavily before finally falling asleep. She scoops one arm beneath their legs and stands, glancing at Amelar in question even as she lays them down on the pillow end of the bed, hands laying down their head with aching care.

“Did you lie about being Guard Captain or something?” says Amelar, eyes trained on Scarien’s face.

“No,” says Lauré. “I became Guard Captain when I told you, and I’ve been Captain ever since.”

“Does being Captain also mean being a nanny?”

“Sometimes,” says Lauré, shrugging. “Kahira needs the help sometimes.”

      Amelar is staring again, and it’s making Lauré uncomfortable. “You put Scarien Kuraht to bed like they’re your own child and you call the North Star by name. What happened to you?”

“I got everything I wanted,” says Lauré, and feels sick to her bones.  

 

\------------

 

She is twenty-four and she is drowning in her own sweat and her limbs burn but she pushes on and on and on until a hand reaches out to stop her. The hand is big and broad and Lauré turns on instinct, sword raised, but it’s sent clattering to the ground by a movement her tired eyes can’t track and in half a breath it’s over. She lands flat on her back and her weariness comes down on her all at once, and she flushes with embarrassment as she lies there and listens to her own wheezing breaths.

“At ease,” says the man who knocked her down, and she tries to slow down her breathing but it comes out as a strained whistle instead and he laughs – he laughs at her! – and a big hand comes into her field of vision. “That’s some work ethic,” he says, as she takes his help and comes to her feet. “I’ve been looking for you, soldier. It’s Lauré, right?”

      Lauré nearly falls down all over again when she looks around at the sound of her name, because the man is none other than Iram Kiplafa, Captain of the Guard. She knows him from the stories behind his scars, as the distant shape taking the Royal Guard through their paces, but she has never seen him up close before. He humours her wide-eyed staring with casual grace.

      His hand comes up to clasp her shoulder in the way she’s seen old veterans do to one another. She feels so light-headed that she almost thinks she’s forgotten how to breathe. “Captain,” she manages, and wants to die when her voice comes out as a strangled squeak.

“Relax,” he tells her, and she bobs her head in an over-eager nod. He picks up her sword and presses it into her hands, and then steps back and unsheathes his own. He lifts it high, bowed out towards her, and Lauré has seen this before but – this time it’s for her—

“Lauré,” says Captain Kiplafa, and Lauré jerks up her sword to meet his so quickly that they clash together. Kiplafa’s mouth turns up at one corner as Lauré’s ears burn in embarrassment. “Why did you choose this path? You come from a family of guards, I know – but why did you choose this?”

      Lauré could tell him many different things, but she goes for the truth. “I don’t know,” she says, and knows she’s said the right thing from the slight nod he gives her. “I’ve always wanted to be a guard, but I don’t think I’ve found any grand reason for it. Not yet, anyway. But I don’t think I need a reason to commit myself, or to love what I do.”

“Being a guard is a simple thing,” says Kiplafa, and he lowers and sheathes his sword, Lauré mirroring the movement. “Many people don’t understand that. They come to the position with ambition, with pride. But this work – it is uncomplicated devotion. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” says Lauré, honest again.

“How would you like to work in the damtower, Lauré?” he asks.

Lauré smiles so widely that her cheeks ache. “I would like that very much,” she says, and just like that her world is changed. Gone are the dockland patrols, the city watch rotation. Instead she walks in soaring halls cut into the cliffs above the harbour. She drills in a courtyard whose edge plummets down into the churning waves, and sleeps in a small room so high up she feels as if she could step out into the starlight and fly. But still she finds no driving passion, no inspiration. She loves the work, the life, the place, and that is enough.

It is enough for exactly a year, because when she is twenty-five she meets Kahira Kuraht, and everything changes all over again.

 

\------------

 

“I’m going to find out what happened up there tomorrow anyway,” says Amelar.

“You’re going to find out the official report,” says Lauré, clenching her hands into fists and staring down at them. She remembers the burning light, the sundering of stone pillars ten metres thick. She remembers the person that the light erupted from – a woman, small in stature, light spilling from her mouth and nose and eyes.

“Lauré,” begins Amelar, but Lauré shakes her head to stop her.

“I’m doing my job,” she says, but it doesn’t fit quite right. “I’m trying to protect my people,” she says instead, and her gaze drifts helplessly to Scarien.  

“Where will you go?” asks Amelar.

“Wherever I can get you to take me,” says Lauré, and Amelar sucks in a shuddery breath. “I know, I – please, Amelar. Please.”

“I’m not going anywhere until the morning,” says Amelar.

“Thank you,” says Lauré. “Thank you – thank you—”

“No promises,” says Amelar, and shoves Lauré down onto the bed beside Scarien. “Get some sleep. You’re a wreck.”

 

\------------

 

      She is tall and sharp-eyed and so sure of herself that the hall falls quiet when she enters. Lauré stares at her, this girl with her head held high beneath the weight of a crown she hadn’t been expected to wear for at least another decade, and she is awed.

“As you were,” calls Captain Kiplafa, and Lauré and thirty other guards fumble to a salute before returning to their sword practise.

      Lauré remembers the previous North Star, a gentle man with kind eyes, and sees little of him in this girl. She is sixteen and she is danger and she knows it, greets Kiplafa with a smile that is as perfectly placed as an assassin’s knife. She orbits the hall once, twice, all of them sweating and nervous under her keen dark eyes, and then leaves.

“You did well,” says Kiplafa, when they all look to him the moment she’s gone, and he looks proud.

      The coronation is a week later, set in the cavernous space of the roosting hall, and Lauré sees that same knifelike smile on the girl’s face as she takes her final walk as a child. Her costume, her hair, her stride – everything is so careful and perfect that it takes Lauré minutes of careful watching to see the sheen of tears on her face. That smile is still in place but Lauré sees now how forced it is, how this is a girl only a fortnight past the death of her beloved nadem.

      The Damasan Queen, leader of Winafore’s dragons, is waiting for Kahira at the far end of the roosting hall. She is a great creature with immensely long curved horns and deep-set yellow eyes. She is resplendent in the ornamentation of her kind – gold piercings crowded along her long ears, the thick growth of her beard and mane bound in her personal braids. Every damasa present – and there is a great crowd of them arrayed behind their Queen – stands with wings bowed out and a thick forelock of hair braided down to hang across the muzzle. It is a grief braid, and Lauré wears one too today, though it is much shorter and less impressive than the thick, two or three metre lengths worn by some of the older damasa. All of the soldiers wear them, and Kahira too – though hers is more elaborately styled, and drawn back to make room for the crown she will soon be burdened with.

“Kahira Kuraht,” says the Damasan Queen, when the girl reaches the end of the walk and kneels before her. “The North Star of Winafore has walked with Inarrae into the next life. Who are you to claim his title?”

“I am his daughter,” says Kahira, and the silence is absolute as everyone present strains to hear her words. “I carry his vision and his love and his honour.”

“And what will you do as our Star?”

“I will give my entire life to the guiding of others. I will protect our proud Winaforian culture. I will honour our pact with the Damasa. And I personally pledge that I will do everything in my power to establish a lasting peace with the Tristérnian Empire.”

“Your vows have been heard, and you will be held to them,” says the Damasan Queen, raising her head to glare out across the crowds and quiet the sudden rush of voices. “Take your crown and face your people as their leader, North Star Kahira Kuraht!”

       The crown is a heavy thing, a thick gold band with two tall spires rising from the brow like the horns of a damasa, and there is a moment where it seems too heavy, too large. Then Kahira steels herself beneath its weight and rises, and when she turns to face the crowd she leaves her childhood behind her. “I am honoured,” she says, and the hall thunders with a round of applause loud enough to momentarily drown out the frantic whispering. It subsides, gradually, and the whispering continues, and Lauré stares straight at Kahira and watches that perfect knife-edged smile as it re-establishes itself on her face.

“If old Runat couldn’t do it, how’s she going to?” says a guard standing just to Lauré’s right. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know anything about war.”

      Lauré keeps her eyes on that smile. Twenty metres away and she can see every tooth. “She knows exactly what she’s doing,” says Lauré, and ignores that other guard’s derisive snort.

 

\------------

 

      Lauré is woken by the rattle of a key in the front door of Amelar’s house, and by the time it opens she is on her feet with sword in hand. Amelar pauses in the doorway and then swats the blade to the side with the flat of her hand. She comes in and shuts and locks the door behind her. She has a bag strapped to her back, the weight of it dragging it down along her spine, and Lauré eyes it curiously as Amelar makes a circuit of the room. She checks the solitary window with its cracked pane of glass, touches the tap, brushes her fingers against the knob of the small stove and then sits on the bed a hand span or so from one of Scarien’s out flung legs.

“The North Star is declaring war on Tristérn,” says Amelar. “They’re saying the peace envoy tried to assassinate her. That they did assassinate the Consort and the kids.”

“Oh,” says Lauré, as Amelar looks pointedly at the still-sleeping and very much alive Scarien sprawled belly-down on the bed. “I didn’t expect that,” she says, truthfully.

“What did you expect?” asks Amelar, eyes narrowed. “Fuck, Lauré – you’ve brought this into my house – this is way bigger than me! This stuff, it’s big, it’s—”

“I need you to get us out of the city, off the island,” says Lauré. “Are we good for that?”

“What happened up there, Lauré? The tower a mess and you trying to shuttle Scarien out of the city and Kahira declaring war – Kahira, when all she’s ever done is try to bring peace—”

“Amelar. Amelar. Are we good?” says Lauré, sitting up and clamping a firm hand on Amelar’s nearest shoulder. “Are we good?”

      Amelar stares at Lauré, takes in a tight breath. Another. She nods, shakes her head. Nods again. “I don’t know, Lauré. This is an awful big thing to be good with.”

“I need,” Lauré begins, and she has to start again because her voice cracks. “I need to do my job,” she says. “Help me do my job, Amelar. Please. This job – this kid – are all I have left. Please, help me.”

      It won’t work. She sees it in the apologetic look that flickers across Amelar’s face. Their childhood together is too long gone for words to bridge the gap. “This house,” says Lauré, and sees Amelar’s shoulders stiffen.  _Yes_. “When we were kids, and you talked about your dream. About travelling, being your own person. I don’t think this shitty little house factored in.”

“It’s mine,” says Amelar, and her tone is a threat.

“You wanted better than this,” says Lauré, and Amelar’s silence is all the affirmation Lauré needs. She leans closer to Amelar, squeezes her shoulder a little tighter. “I can get you that,” she says, and Amelar’s eyes spark with interest, enough for Lauré to let go of her shoulder and reach for the metal collar of her uniform shirt. She unclasps it and pulls out the chain she wears beneath – her metal identification tags and three keys. She pulls off two of the keys and presses them into Amelar’s hands. “The bigger one is the key to my quarters. The little one is for the safe I keep in my wardrobe. Everything in it is yours.”

“That’s – Lauré, that’s yours.”

“Lauré Nilasémo is dead,” says Lauré. “So that safe - it’s not mine anymore. None of it is. So find that safe, and make the life that you’ve always wanted. Just help me save what’s left of mine before you do.”

 

\------------

 

      Amelar leads them to a  _venular_  - not a particularly large one but well kept and a far cry from the sad state of her tiny house. It’s eight metres in length, three and half across at its widest, and has canvas tacked across the front most portion of its deck rather than the elaborate cabins of its larger cousins. Amelar has it berthed beside one of the smaller piers, secured by two thick mooring ropes. She swings down into it – the venular too small for a walkway – and then holds her arms up for Lauré to pass down Scarien. They scowl at the handling, the most normal thing Lauré’s seen them do since the attack, and something starts to relax in Lauré’s chest.

“Get under the canvas and stay there,” says Amelar, and Scarien goes but Lauré doesn’t. “Go,” Amelar repeats, but Lauré shakes her head.

“You’re too shaky to get this thing up by yourself,” she says.

“I’ve been piloting solo for nineteen years. I can handle this.”

“Yeah, and how much sleep did you get last night?”

      There’s a jewel-bright flash in the sky that cuts them off, and they both flinch and squint against the glare of it. It’s a brilliance Lauré recognises, and she tastes bile in her mouth.

“What is that?” says Amelar, stumbling to stand by Lauré’s side. “Lauré?”

“It’s the same thing as yesterday,” says Lauré, and she swallows tightly as she remembers the woman with the light pouring from her. The light that lanced out, solid as any weapon, punching through the Consort’s chest and deep into the stonework beyond.

“But what is it?” asks Amelar, and Lauré shakes her head, unable to answer.

They watch as the light fades, shrinking back into the ruined damtower. There is a moment of devastating silence, and then a roar of noise. A solitary shape rises from the wreckage, that of a damasa with wings spread wide, and half a breath later it is followed by hundreds of others, more and more until the sky above the bay is thronging with them. They wheel once, twice, and then make straight for the open water.

“Inarrae reap my soul,” says Amelar, her voice raw. “They’re leaving. All of them. They’re leaving us!”

“We should be leaving too,” says Lauré.

“But they’re – the damasa can’t leave Frinlanto’stoi! They can’t!”

“Well, they are,” says Lauré. She grabs for the mooring rope nearest to her and heaves it free. “Come on, Amelar. We’ve got to go!”

      There are other venulars in the water, heading for the open space of the bay. There are so many of them that the bay is as confused with colour as the sky with the damasa swarming above. Lauré wants to be in the middle of that throng, safe, not at the trailing end. She runs to the other mooring rope and looses that one too, and then they’re adrift. She grabs Amelar by the shoulder and shakes her.

“This is—”

“Everything you’ve ever wanted,” says Lauré. “Just get us out of here and you can have it all, remember!”

      She goes to shake Amelar again, but is pushed away. “All right, all right,” says Amelar. “Trust me, I remember!”

      Amelar goes to one side of the venular and works furiously on a crank, unwinding a long length of rope. It’s quickly picked up by the winds created by the flocking damasa and the other venulars, cast up high and taut and dragging the long banner of the skyharness with it. The venular lurches when the harness is caught by the wind, nearly pitching Lauré off her feet, but with only one half of the lines loosed the venular sinks back into the water and under Amelar’s control. They pull rapidly away from the pier and soon join the others vying for position out in the harbour, and with so many eyes so close by Lauré hunkers down by one side of the venular, where her guard uniform isn’t so blatantly on display. She’s glad for it when Amelar looses the other set of lines. The skyharness leaps upward, the lines snapping taut with tremendous force, and Lauré is pressed down into the floor as the entire venular is dragged clear of the water. There are others nosing skywards all around them, a sight Lauré knows from a distance but never in person. In the company of forty others they rise and bank and rise again, and Lauré looks across the bay to the damasa wheeling there and wonders if they feel anything like she does in this moment.

      Their destination is the most distant Amelar could secure – a small north-western township out in the middle of nowhere. Miringnell. Some old religious retreat for damasan-worship that had grown beyond its original purpose, into its own place. All Lauré cares about is its isolation – a good three hundred miles separate it from the next-nearest settlement. It’ll be a far cry from the city life she’s always known, but she’ll do anything to keep Scarien safe.

      They’re all she has left.

 

\------------

 

Miringnell is small and green and strange. It’s also oddly gentle, once they get past the roughness of a dry landing. There is no clamour of voices here, no whir of machinery, no clashing swords or armoured boots. Lauré doesn’t know what to make of it.

“Will you be all right?” asks Amelar, as Lauré wakes Scarien and pulls the hood of the borrowed cloak up over their mussed curls (so like Kahira’s she has to stop for a moment and just  _breathe_ ).

“You don’t need to worry about that,” says Lauré. She looks up at Amelar and smiles, the expression tight with stress. “Thank you. For everything.”

      Amelar smiles back, only a tiny quirk of her mouth but enough, and turns away.

 

\------------

 

      The house is quite tall for such a rural setting, narrow, the bricks gone pale cream in the glow of dawn. Lauré stands on the step for long minutes, wavering a little with exhaustion. She is the farthest from home she has ever been. She has done everything she needs to do. She has already been to the local priesthood in the small damtower in the centre of the town and secured them lodgings and safety. She had told them the truth, as much of it as she knew, and their eyes had shown horror but their words had been nothing but kindness. They will be safe.

      One of the priests had offered to take the dispatch to the local printers on her behalf, but Lauré – she doesn’t quite know her reasons for insisting on taking it herself. It’s only thanks to her training that she’s even remotely steady on her feet. There’s a sheaf of paper in one of her hands, and four spare copies in the bag Amelar had given to her. There’s just one step left.

      She raises a hand and knocks on the door.

 

 


End file.
